Final confrontation with the shadow

The Final confrontation with the shadow is the climactic event of A Wizard of Earthsea, the moment toward which Ged's entire journey—from the fog-weaving at Ten Alders through the School on Roke, the dragon-battle at Pendor, the temptations of the Court of the Terrenon, and the long pursuit across the seas—has been inexorably driving. It is the point at which the young wizard, following the counsel of his master Ogion to "turn around" and "hunt the hunter," ceases to flee and instead seeks out the nameless evil he had loosed, meeting it on a dry, silent plain beyond the known world and there performing an act not of destruction but of integration: naming the shadow with his own name and joining with it, thereby healing the wound in his being and becoming whole.

The Approach Across the Open Sea

After leaving Iffish with his friend Vetch, Ged sailed eastward from Astowell, the last known land, into the Open Sea. For days he held a powerful magewind, driving the boat Lookfar with a speed and endurance that astonished Vetch, who felt his own power weaken and go astray so far from land. Ged spoke little, watching always ahead, and when Vetch questioned whether the shadow might be luring them beyond where a man could survive, Ged answered only, "Estarriol, we are coming near." On the third day, Ged stood up suddenly in the prow and dropped the magewind; the sail hung slack though the world's wind blew strong. He took up the oars and rowed, and the sea grew still, the swells diminishing until the boat seemed to move over water that lay almost landlocked. Vetch, though he could not see what Ged saw, began to perceive with his wizard's eye a darkness welling up in the hollows of the waves, and the billows grew low and sluggish as if choked with sand. When Ged spoke the Revelation-spell, there was no change: this was no illusion. The sea had turned to sand.

The Dry Land and the Meeting

Ged stepped over the side of the boat onto dark sand that whispered under his step. His staff began to shine with a clear white glow, so bright it reddened his fingers where he held the radiant wood. He strode forward, but in no direction: there were no directions here, only towards and away. Vetch, watching from the boat, saw the light like a great slow star moving through the darkness, and the darkness about it thickened and drew together. Ged saw at the faint outermost edge of the light a shadow coming toward him over the sand. At first shapeless, it took on the look of a man: an old man, then his father the smith, then Jasper with his insolent handsome face and silver-clasped grey cloak. Ged did not stop. The figure became Pechvarry, his face bloated and pallid like a drowned man's, reaching out strangely. Still Ged went forward. Then the thing changed utterly, spreading out enormous thin wings, writhing, swelling, shrinking; Ged saw in it Skiorh's white face, then a pair of clouded staring eyes, then a fearful face he did not know, with writhing lips and eyes like pits going back into black emptiness. Ged lifted the staff high, and its radiance brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled even that ancient darkness. All form of man sloughed off the thing; it drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand, but still it came forward, lifting up a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance and heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face and stopped.

The Naming and the Merging

Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name, and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one. To Vetch, watching in terror from far off, it seemed that Ged was overcome, for the clear radiance failed and grew dim. He ran toward that small fading glimmer, but the sand sank under his feet, and with a roar of noise and a glory of daylight, and the bitter cold of winter and the bitter taste of salt, the world was restored to him and he floundered in the sudden, true, and living sea.

The Aftermath and the Meaning

Vetch pulled Ged into the boat. Ged was dazed and his eyes stared as if they saw nothing, but there was no hurt on him. His staff, black yew-wood, all radiance quenched, was grasped in his right hand. He said no word. But when, later, he saw the new moon shining in the west, he stood up erect, holding his staff in his two hands as a warrior holds his long sword, and looked about at the sky, the sea, the brown swelling sail, his friend's face. "Estarriol," he said, "look, it is done. It is over." He laughed. "The wound is healed," he said, "I am whole, I am free." Then he bent over and hid his face in his arms, weeping like a boy. Vetch, who had watched with anxious dread, not sure if this was Ged or the evil thing that might have taken his form, saw the truth: Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole—a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. As they sailed westward, Vetch sang aloud the words from The Creation of Éa: "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky."